700.AZ: Case study

700.az is the #1 e-learning platform in Azerbaijan (more than 100 lessons with media content and tests created on the site using MathJax and LaTeX) with 2000 registered users. It’s an online portal that helps students to prepare for the Unified State Exams.

Our Task

Working with CodeIT our client has started a new startup – online learning platform that offers online courses on different subjects. The idea was to create 4 program tracks to prepare for the unified state exam. Each track corresponding to 5 subjects and each subject assigned to one specific teacher.

The platform should provide the following:

personal accounts;

lessons for students;

tests;

progress and statistics;

friends network;

exchange messages;

forums;

webinars;

payment.

Lessons had to be protected in order no registered user will be able to download them. System functionality implies specific user roles, each of them having its own access and abilities:

Guest

Student

Teacher

Adviser

Admin

The Implementation

Guest mode

In the guest mode, the visitor can take a look at the landing page, main menu navigation and read the general information about the website. For other functionality Guest users can register in a traditional way, or by using their Facebook or Twitter accounts (due to the integration with the FB and Twitter APIs). During the registration it is necessary to indicate contact & personal information, city, school and what program track the Guest user requires.

Student mode

These kind of users are the main target audience of the platform. The portal provides social interactions: users can be friends, use message system and chat with each other in the forum. In terms of learning, they can watch video lessons, pass tests, see their results and progress, view webinars and read the news feed. At the same time Plus they can have adviser (for example parent), who will follow their results and could pay for services.

All students have a navigation menu placed on the left side that contains the following sections:

Homepage – the start page with the Parallax scrolling feature;

Tariffs – students can choose the pricing plan depending on how many subjects they want to study;

Courses – the list of courses that are both currently assigned to the students and the ones they can sign up to. Each course has a %-bar that indicated the progress of the student in this course. If the teacher adds new lesson – the %-bar will automatically update;

Tests – students can go to the test page;

Progress – this section shows how many lessons are completed and which lessons were the easiest and the hardest in every subject;

Friends network – students can invite their friends through FaceBook, Twitter or e-mail and create their network, exchange messages, follow, see each other’s profiles etc;

Messages – users can go to the messaging board;

Balance – shows if the student has enough resources to subscribe to another course.

Besides, notifications in the header of the page inform students when a certain test will start, the registration for the test will open when the test is ready to start, remaining time, webinar data and information, notifications from the Admin. In the header Forum and News buttons can be found – by clicking them students can either see forum threads and participate in discussions or see the news feed.

Teacher mode

The registration/login process is the same as for students. Basically Teachers have almost the same side menu, except that they can not add friends and they manage the lessons.

Teacher see classes that they coordinate, with the ability to create new topic and lessons that relate to that topic. In the lesson they can add:

video

test

interactive questions to the video

The number of questions is infinite. They consist of:

image

answer variants

explanation of the correct answer

Questions can be reorganized in any order with the Drag-n-Drop feature and teachers can add equations, that are implemented with the help of MathJax and LaTeX libraries. Moreover, they can add, edit or delete lessons and topics any time they want, and this will affect students’ progress bar and course menu. Additionally, Teachers add webinars (previously approved by the Admin) that relate to their subjects, edit or delete them.

Adviser mode

Adviser is connected to a specific student, to monitor the progress or refill the balance. These users can see all the courses taken by students with progress bars the same way that students see this page, except they can not sign up for the course or write a message to the teacher. News and Forum features are also open to these users. If the Student gets blocked for some reason – the Adviser also gets blocked automatically Basically, it is a feature for parents to pay the tuition and see the progress.

Administrator mode

There can be only one Admin user who monitors all the process. Admin logs into the Admin panel with his email and password and sees the following sections:

Users – can see the full information and manage Student’s or Teacher’s profile;

Accounting – sees all the operations connected to the balance – refill, purchase of the webinar/test/subscription, balance withdraw or request for it;

General tests – can add, edit or delete specific data about every test on the platform;

Pages – manage all pages of the platform;

News – the feed is also handled by the Admin;

Tickets – respond to the messages and requests that users send directly;

Lessons – monitors and manages the lessons created by Teachers;

Webinars – approves the webinars requested by Teachers.

Additionally, the Admin can see the history of all the actions that were performed by any user on the website and change the system settings.

Payment

The system requires payment for lessons, webinars and tests. Payment is made offline by purchasing a balance refill code at the company’s office, or a coupon with a refill code at any distribution point, or through the GoldenPay service. The amount paid for the refill code is transferred to user’s internal balance. To do this, User needs to enter the refill code in the special section of his menu.

Applied Technologies

Web

Zend2

php

MySQL

html/css

JS

MathJax

LaTeX

WYSIWYG editor

3rd Party API

Facebook

Twitter

YouTube

Citrix GoToWebinar

GoldenPay

Azercell

Ulduzum

Our Input

As of August 2015, the platform has more than 2000 registered users and attracts around 1600 users a month. The site won the 1st place “Education and Science category” in the national Netty 2015 Award. More than 500 lessons and tests have already been created and used and hundreds of students have successfully passed the Unified State Exams with the help of 700.az platform!

WebDevelopment

QualityAssurance

GraphicDesign

ProjectManagement

BusinessAnalysis

Our clients say

Keith Lammon
VP
Urethanesupply

I posted this project and within minutes guys from CodeIT bid on the project. I asked a few questions through Skype to feel confident that they could do the job. I felt comfortable with the knowledge and skills and accepted their offer. I am usually hesitant to hire from offshore. Not because of the work quality but, usually the language barrier and working hours. Guys from CodeIT was available during NY working hours and after pre-screening on Skype, I could tell they know English well.

Paul Marcus
CEO
PitchPersonal

I have worked with CodeIT for over a year now on a complex application development project and they have been excellent. They have been flexible with scaling resources up and down as I’ve needed it, their project managers have been extremely responsive and I hear from them every day and never have to wonder where they are as I have with past outsourcing projects. Highly recommended if you’re considering outsourcing software development.

Vikas Singla
COO
Teknas

Collaboration with CodeIT gave my business great prospects for its expansion and scaling. Together with CodeIT professionals, we grew our product line from three to fourteen products within only one year. I can rely on these guys to get a high-quality product on time.

Thanks, V

Esteban Cascante
Project Manager
Sweet Rush

I wanted to personally thank you for your hard work on this. Working with CodeIT turned out to be a really pleasant experience for us.

Since the beginning, your team seemed to be really well structured and everyone understood its role and responsibilities.
Also, the quality of the work CodeIt delivered was exactly what we expected it to be.
This really facilitated our daily work and help us to keep the client happy.
I hope this first experience working together help us to build a long-term partnership.

Mikael Svensson
CIO
SST NET

This was the biggest project I’ve made so far and CodeIT helped me and our company through it in a perfect way.

Working with one very skilled project manager and multiple developers and testers with him made our project fly in a very short period of time, and with a super high quality!

Andrew Pickin
CEO
Stilgiyin.com

CodeIT has been working for us for one and a half years. We are ending the project now because it is complete. CodeIT built our platform from scratch and also provided further development and support for the rest of the contract. They are very strong in several areas: back-end development (specialising in Zend Framework); front-end development; server administration; project management. Their project managers speak excellent English and are courteous and professional. Their developers are fast and skilled, and up to date with the latest technologies. Their expertise helped us to build a highly reliable website which can serve a heavy load of traffic. Finally, they are all very nice people, and I cannot recommend them highly enough.

Misha Milshtein
Director of Engineering and Development
Sweet Rush

This was our first project, and I am so happy that it had a smooth run and a successful resolution.
I sincerely hope that this is just the first step in our long and mutually amiable partnership.